fiction

from Recuerdo
by Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo

Chapter XVIII

November 1992

Message

From: avm@un.org.th

Subject: A Love Story

Reply To: mm@mol.com.ph

My dear Risa,

It’s sweet of you to go to mass with your Lola Isabel when she asks you to because you want to spare her “unnecessary unhappiness.” I do appreciate your efforts to understand even when you feel she is “overdoing the guardian bit.” Perhaps one good thing that telling you these tales will accomplish is they will bring you a little closer to your grandmother.

But about this young man, Dante. I don’t think that Lola does not like him. Rather, she does not understand him, and therefore, cannot trust him. He is DIFFERENT. I am sure you will agree that because of his background, he is different from other Filipino boys. He does not give off or recognize the same signals. She cannot predict what he thinks about anything or how he will act in a given situation. Therefore, she feels you need to be protected from him.

What she fails to see?or perhaps does not really wish to see, as seeing would mean confronting problems she does not feel able to cope with?is that YOU are also different from most Filipino girls, and LIKE Dante, and therefore, are not in the dark about his thoughts, feelings, etc.

I shall write Lola separately?this is too complex for a hurried telephone conversation?to try and make her understand.

But you, my dear daughter, I shall advise to be careful. For even if you think you know him, one’s emotions can sometimes blind one to what one already knows. Another cliché. The feeling behind it is sincere though. And I’m sure you know that this feeling can only always be the deepest love for you.

You ask what I think of Lola Pinang’s decision. I assume you mean her refusal to give up her lover at her daughter’s request. To be very honest, I’m not sure, Risa. She was right about it being her life, of course. But how could she have simply brushed her own daughter’s hopes aside? How could she have forfeited her child’s future? For she did ruin her daughter’s chances for marriage to the man she loved. I ask myself: what would I have done in her place? When I was younger, I would not have hesitated over the answer. But I am much humbler now.

According to Mama, she too has been unable to make up her mind about whether to admire or despise Doña Josefina for what she did that day.

While on the subject of love… today is my wedding anniversary. I mention this not to make you feel guilty for having forgotten it (I can hardly expect you to remember), but because I want to share this with someone.

Had your father not died when he did, we would have been married twenty-three years today. In two more years, we would celebrate our silver anniversary.

Today it pains me that there is not more pain, that even the deepest wounds heal. I remember the long years when I would wake up with a jolt, which was, I think, an act of will, because sleep had become more painful than waking, since it was haunted by a recurring nightmare. In it I would be running in a panic through a long, winding, twisting corridor, trying to find your father, knowing I had to warn him, to warn him of something evil. I knew he was just a few steps ahead of me, but always a few steps beyond me, for I could not catch up with him. I would wake up panting, and weeping. To calm myself I would get up and walk to the kitchen to fix myself a cup of tea, careful not to wake you and Danny. And I would sip it slowly, sitting in the darkness of the sala, rubbing my throbbing temples, repeating like a chant, like a spell, “Vicente… Vicente…”

I still feel the loss today, but I am no longer able to imagine what life would be like for me now if he were still here. I have gone down paths too different from the one we had followed together. This should be another source of grief. But it isn’t. Not anymore.

May I talk to you a little about him, my dear— I have told you bits of this story, but never the whole story, I think. Today, I need to remember him again. Vicente, my young husband.

I want to remember how I met him.

I was working for the school paper, and had gone to the office of the student council to interview the new president, who was a medical student. The office was tiny, for those were the days before student power, and it had occurred to no one that the university’s highest governing student body deserved more than a cubicle, squeezed in between the post office and the office of the Prefect of Discipline.

My eyes still smarting from the glare of the afternoon sunlight, I peered into the office, which seemed packed with boys in white uniforms, and asked, was Mike Hernandez in?

“He isn’t,” someone answered, “but if you will settle for a substitute…”

I turned to see who had spoken, and fell in love with Vicente Moreno.

For what else could it have been— Looking up at him, tall and trim in his white uniform, smiling his roughish smile… the glow, like a piece of the afternoon sunlight, trapped in the tiny room with us, so that everyone else seemed left in the shadows, left in the gloom… And it was some time before I realized that Mike Hernandez had come in, and was looking on sheepishly and wondering who it was that I had really come to interview for the school paper.

I remembered the questions I had prepared for Mike, and asked them hastily. But I hardly heard his answers. And later, hurrying to get to the car, which I knew would be waiting, for it was now way past six, I remembered only that Vicente Moreno was his friend and captain of the university’s debating team, which had just beaten three other colleges in the interscholastic debating contest, and was preparing for the championship bout.

He followed me into the corridor, which was cool and dusky with November’s first shadows, stopped me by an old pillar to ask, where could he send the invitations— He wanted me to watch his debate, he said.

I told him, and then practically ran out to the car, the lines of a poem I had read in a class going round and round in my head…

*This is my window/ just now did I so softly wake…*

When I saw him again, it was from the balcony of another school’s auditorium, squeezed in among noisy students from a dozen different colleges and universities, who had all made him their favorite. And the three of us?Emily, Charito, and I?joined in the feverish applause that greeted his team’s victory and his own award as the afternoon’s best debater.

After it was over, my temples pounding, my hands tingling, we pushed our way through the crowd to the foot of the stage, wondering whether we could get close enough to congratulate him, for around him milled a throng of giggling, gushing “colegialas.” I had signaled Emily to turn back for it seemed hopeless, when Vicente Moreno saw me, came to me, took the small cold hand I offered in both of his, while I stood there, my face burning, frightened by my own trembling, thinking: this is he, the fair young god of all my dreams… And there was the glow again, grown more intense, like fire, like electricity, running from him to me and back again, through our clasped hands, through our eyes…

The afternoon that he came to our college to see me for the first time, he stood in the corridor outside my classroom in his white uniform, leaning against the window, lighting a cigarette. I walked up to him, and he said something about exams and overtime at the hospital?or was it time off from the hospital? ?but I hardly heard him, because he was standing in the light, and there was a strange humming in my ears.

Oh, what a time it was! We were boy and girl, twenty-one and seventeen, stopping under the pine trees to listen to the chapel bells tolling the angelus, gazing at a world grown breathlessly, throbbingly beautiful…

*I could believe everything round about was still as I / transparent as a crystal’s depth, darkened, silent / I could hold even the stars in me too, so big my heart seemed to me…*

I felt like Kate in Virginia Woolf’s “Night and Day,” like Yvette in D.H. Lawrence’s “The Virgin and the Gypsy.” It seemed to me that before Vicente, all my life had been an anticipation, a waiting for something strange and wonderful to happen. Vicente filled a bare place, a vague emptiness. And suddenly, there was the fragrance of jasmines, the warmth of April, the luminous corals by the sea’s edge.

He was surprised to learn that I was only seventeen. He was himself twenty-one, and in his last year of medical school. “Never mind,” he said, grinning. “With those dark glasses and those nylon stockings, you look at least thirty.”

I gave in unreservedly to my feeling for him?I did not yet dare call it love, perhaps because of some habit of thought, some expectation, that such an admission had to come from him?exulting in it, proclaiming it to the whole world!

He told me that at nine, he had already known that he would be a doctor. And now, the future stretched out clearly and splendidly before him?like some straight white way, waiting only to be traversed. He would take his internship, then the Board examinations, then a specialization abroad. He would be a neurosurgeon. And, without my asking, for I would not have dared ask, he added that he wanted a wife and a family, of course, but only much later, when he had earned the right to have one.

Later, when he suddenly, inexplicably, stopped calling, stopped coming to see me, I told myself that was the reason. He had decided it was not the right time, I was too young, he had too much to do. But it didn’t help.

For months I was in a daze, bewildered by the anguish for which nothing?not my imagination, not my books, not my own earlier schoolgirl loves?had prepared me. And for a long time afterwards, at unexpected moments, I would catch my breath, thinking: nothing will ever make up for this. Nothing.

If I had known then what greater loss I would suffer, what deeper sorrow I would know, through this man, would I have not renounced all claim to him then?

*We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence…*

That’s Annie Dillard.

Take good care, my dearest daughter.

                                                                                                    Mama

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